Dr Carina Hoang was 16 years old when she fled war-torn Vietnam with two of her younger siblings.
It was May 1979, and the trio boarded a small wooden boat — 24 metres long and four-and-a-half metres wide. On board with them were around 370 others.
"We were packed in four layers of people, like sardines," Hoang says….
…Australia's then-prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, was widely credited for accepting Southeast Asian refugees. Between April 1975 and March 1991, more than 130,000 refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were resettled here, according to Rachel Stevens, a lecturer from the Australian Catholic University who specialises in immigration and refugee policies.
The 1970s also marked two major turning points for immigration policy in Australia: the formal dismantling of the White Australia policy by the Whitlam government in 1973 and the introduction of the Racial Discrimination Act in 1975, which made it unlawful to discriminate against a person because of their race, descent, national or ethnic origin or immigrant status.
However, Stevens says Australia's intake only ramped up in 1978-79. She attributes this to the 1976 arrival of 'boat people' for the first time, which "forced the Fraser government to formalise the refugee intake process".